More hilarious raccoon antics.
I have a note that says to write about the scam I am involved in but at this point, I don’t even know which scam that is.
One scam is that a culture reporter from the CBC contacted me for an interview about my book of short stories.
OMG! I thought. I am on fire! This was right after pen name did the book festival. All my hard work is finally paying off.
I did a search for the name and it was a real CBC reporter who covers Indigenous culture. Sure, the email sounded totally written by AI — but maybe the reporter has a busy assistant. Well yeah, the book is about 10 years old and sold maybe 100 copies. But maybe it’s a slow day and they want some lesser known names.
I answered right away. And then did more research.
This is a common scam. Once you agree to the interview they ask for money. Also the email address was a gmail, not CBC.
They responded agreeing to the first interview time I said I was available and said many writers like to make donations to their non-profit.
☹️ I did not follow through with the interview. I did not make a “donation.”
These are all the hangers from Dad’s apartment. Who wants them?
A different scam was when I was trying to sell my dad’s couch on NextDoor. I couldn’t believe it when 4 people (FOUR!) responded minutes after I posted the ad.
I started with the first person who was in a big hurry to pay so her cousin could rush over and pick it up. What luck!
Next was a bunch of back and forth with my paying app which I legit hardly ever use and don’t completely understand. I felt like a dummy so I let the person push me around. They told me that the payment was taken from them but there was a problem with my account that I needed to fix. They told me to check my email to see if there was a notice from the app.
Sure enough, there was an email “from the app” with a number to call.
I dialed, hit call … and immediately disconnected.
I did some research. This was not the support number of the app. This is a common scam. I blocked the person. I changed my password — just for overkill. The “support number” tried to call me. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I blocked that.
I looked at the other people who contacted me and they were all scammers, too. None of them were even in my state.
I nuked my NextDoor account.
The final scam was for penname. Someone talking like AI contacted me 3 times about one of my romance novels to ask about introducing it to some kind of women’s reading group on Goodreads. Yes – this is a common scam. I don’t how they wanted to gank money out of me but this time I never even answered.
